Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [35]
“Potheads,” Bonnie would say, and dismiss them. Also the way the girl was sitting on the boy’s lap, she wouldn’t like that. But Harmon had the impression that everyone young smoked pot these days, as much as they had in the sixties. His own sons probably had, and maybe Kevin still did, but not when his wife was around. Kevin’s wife drank soy milk, made up baggies of granola, talked about her yoga class—Harmon and Bonnie would roll their eyes. Still, Harmon admired the vigor behind it, just as he admired the couple next to him. The world was their oyster. It was in their easiness, in the clarity of the girl’s skin, her high and strong voice. Harmon felt the way he had as a child when he’d been walking along a dirt road after a rainstorm and had found a quarter in a puddle. The coin had seemed huge and magical. This couple had the same pull on his excitement—such abundance sitting next to him.
“We could take a nap,” the girl was saying. “This afternoon. Then we’ll be able to stay up. We’ll want to, everyone’s going to be there.”
“We can do that,” the boy answered.
At the counter there was no room to read the paper, and Harmon ate his eggs and corn muffin watching the young couple, seated at a table by the window. The girl was thinner than he’d have thought; her torso—even with its little denim jacket—was no bigger than a wash-board as she leaned forward over the table. At one point, she folded her arms and put her head down. The boy spoke, his relaxed face never changing. When she sat up, he touched her hair, rubbing the ends between his fingers.
Harmon got two doughnuts in two separate bags, and left. It was early September and the maples were red at their tops; a few bright red leaves had fallen onto the dirt road, perfect things, star-shaped. Years earlier when his sons were small, Harmon might have pointed to them, and they’d have picked them up with eagerness—Derrick, especially, had loved leaves, and twigs, and acorns. Bonnie would find half the woods under his bed. “You’ll get a squirrel living in here,” she’d say, directing him to clean it out, while the boy cried. Derrick had been a pack rat with a sentimental streak. Harmon walked along, leaving his car at the marina, the air like a cold washcloth on his face. Each of his sons had been his favorite child.
Daisy Foster lived in a small winterized cottage at the very top of the dirt road that wound its way down past the marina to the water. From her little living room you could see a small strip of the water far out. From her dining room you could see the dirt road just a few feet away, although in the summer there were the brambly bridal wreaths that flowered up against her window. Today the shrubs were twiggy and bare, and it was cold; she had started a fire in the stove in the kitchen. Earlier, she had changed out of her church clothes, putting on a pale blue sweater that matched her eyes, and now she sat smoking a cigarette at the dining room table, watching the tips of the branches of the Norwegian pine across the road move up and down just slightly.
Daisy’s husband, old enough to be her father, had died three years ago. Her lips moved, thinking of him coming to her last night in that dream, if you wanted to call it a dream. She tapped her cigarette ash into the big glass ashtray. A natural lover, he’d always said. Through the window she saw the young couple drive by—Kathleen Burnham’s cousin and his girlfriend. They drove a dented Volvo with bumper stickers all over it, reminding Daisy of the way old suitcases used to look, covered with stamped visas, back in the day. She saw the girl was talking, while the boy, driving, nodded. Peering through the twiggy bridal wreath that touched the window, Daisy thought she saw a bumper sticker that said VISUALIZE SWIRLED PEAS, over a picture of the earth.
She squashed her cigarette in the big glass ashtray just as Harmon came into sight. Harmon’s slow walk, his slumped shoulders, made him look older than he was, and just in this quick glimpse she could see how he carried within him a sadness. But his eyes, when